Stephen Cooper received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine, and his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. Among his honors are an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Fiction and the Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activities Award at California State University, Long Beach. He discovered and edited the manuscript of John Fante's last book, The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959, and is also a co-editor of John Fante: A Critical Gathering.
For most readers, the name John Fante primarily evokes fond memories of the 1956 movie version of his novel Full of Life, starring Judy Holliday, for which he also wrote the screenplay. But, as this first major biography of the novelist makes clear, Fante's early novels about the experiences of an Italian American writer in Los Angeles are the works for which he should be remembered. Cooper (English, California State Univ., Long Beach) skillfully shows the parallels between the writer's own life story and the fiction he carved out of it. This sympathetic and thorough portrait of the novelist shows not only his achievements and charm but also his less than admirable qualities, e.g., hard drinking, gambling, womanizing, and the squandering of his considerable talents on movie and television work. Cooper also successfully evokes the Los Angeles literary and entertainment milieus in which Fante existed. The reader will want to go out and find copies of Fante's best fiction, such as Ask the Dust and Wait Until Spring, Bandini, as well as his short stories. Recommended for larger public and university library collections.--Morris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll., Brooklyn Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Hailed by many as the great novel about L.A., Ask the Dust (Stackpole, 1939) was primed to place Fante--and his alter-ego Arturo Bandini--in the American literary world forever. Cooper, a film lecturer at California State University at Long Beach, beautifully details the hardscrabble life of this little-known American great who squandered his best writing for the riches of Hollywood. Born in 1909 to Italian immigrant parents and educated at Catholic schools in Denver, Colo., at 23 Fante left a fragmented family life for L.A., where he scraped together a living doing manual labor, shipwork and canning in order to write in the evenings. An admirer of H.L. Mencken, Fante began a one-sided correspondence with the famed editor and submitted all his work to the American Mercury, until in 1934 Mencken accepted "Altar Boy," the first of many short stories that Fante would publish. Soon Fante set to work on a novel and, with Mencken's help, he found employment as a Hollywood screenwriter to support himself. Cooper seamlessly pieces together every detail of Fante's life, from the amount he was paid for each script to the gambling debts he incurred. He also tenderly portrays Fante's tumultuous 46-year relationship with his wife, Joyce, and their four children. Joyce would take dictation for the ailing writer, who, before he died in 1983, lost his eyesight and both legs to the ravages of diabetes. Cooper's enthusiasm for Fante is matched only by that of the late Charles Bukowski, who proclaimed that Fante taught him how to write and in the early 1980s encouraged Black Sparrow Press to reissue his work. In the end, Cooper makes a convincing case for Fante's placement on the mantel of the greats. Photos. (Apr.) FYI: Fante's complete works are available through Black Sparrow Press. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
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